Roy Bhaskar

Roy Bhaskar was a British philosopher whose work founded the movement known as critical realism. In A Realist Theory of Science he argued that experiments make sense only if the world contains real causal structures and mechanisms that exist independently of our knowledge, whether or not they produce regular sequences of events. He then extended this realism to the social sciences, arguing that society, though dependent on human activity, has real structures that social science can study.

Key ideas

• Reality is stratified into the real (mechanisms), the actual (events) and the empirical (experiences).
• The epistemic fallacy wrongly reduces questions about what exists to questions about what we know.
• Causal laws describe tendencies of mechanisms, which may operate without producing regular outcomes.
• Social structures pre-exist individuals and are reproduced or transformed by their actions.

Major works

• A Realist Theory of Science (1975)
• The Possibility of Naturalism (1979)
• Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993)

In the conversation

• Question What did Weber actually mean by “value-free” social science? Sana Rizvi · 3 replies